Young playwright fills stage with heart and blood

That observation can be applied with equal measures of criticism and praise to Noah Haidle's new play, "Rag and Bone," which just opened at Long Wharf Theatre's Stage II in New Haven.

Haidle takes his play's title from the last lines of the poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion" by William Butler Yeats:

"Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

Two brothers are at the center of this dark, often bloody, fable. George (Justin Hagan) is a seemingly obsessed sort, while his younger brother, Jeff (Ian Brennan), is sweetly "slow." They may remind you of the dreamers George and Lennie in Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men."

They own a ladder store - symbolically if not successfully - which for Jeff has real purpose. "If it weren't for us," he asks, "how would people get cats out of trees? Or footballs off garages?"

For George, the store is simply a front for his bizarre, if well-meaning, business of stealing and selling human hearts.

A variety of customers drop into the store looking for a heart to replace their own, somehow clued in - it's never explained by whom or why - to speak the code phrase "I was told to come here for a very special ladder."

When the play begins, the hearts, which George keeps in a beverage cooler, include those of a poet, a pediatrician, a public defender and his own mother.

How George comes by these vital organs is never explained, though The Poet simply says, "My heart was stolen from me."

In addition to The Poet, other characters in the play are given label-sounding names: The Hooker, T-Bone (a pimp), A Customer, A Waiter and The Millionaire.

The thing that drives these people to George's larder is unhappiness with the life they experience through their own internal pumps. It's a bit of a romantic stretch to suggest it's the heart rather than the brain or the eyes that defines what we feel and care about.

Haidle writes with flair and occasional splashes of wit, but for the most part his heart is mired in sentimentality. His comic attention, with collegiate zeal, seldom lets an opportunity for a bawdy line to go unspoken. There are as many references to fellatio as there are to ripped bodices in romance novels.

Near the end, there's a final strange twist when George persuades Jeff to put their mother's heart into his body. When George comes to after the switch, he's become Mom, a chain-smoking alcoholic with an unnatural attraction to son Jeff.

There's a great deal of punching of stomachs and bopping of heads, as if this were a Three Stooges movie, and the transplanting of hearts scenes are as bloody as anything from "Sweeney Todd."

At one point half of the characters' chests are covered with blood-soaked bandages, and the curtain that is pulled across the stage when the operations are performed is splattered from one end to the other.

But like the land of Oz, where characters pine for the missing piece of their completeness, Haidle's landscape is strange and slightly scary. Not Kansas, it's more like Chicago's slaughterhouse-filled South Side.

I must confess a fondness for intentionally gory silliness like this, and - aside from such pretentious lines as "Between grief or nothing, I choose grief" - there is a bright if unbridled talent on display.

�

"Rag and Bone" plays through March 6 at Long Wharf Theatre's Stage II, 222 Sergent Drive, Exit 46 off I-95, New Haven. Performances are Tuesdays and Sundays at 7 p.m., Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8, with matinees Saturdays at 3 and Sundays at 2. Tickets are $50 to $60; call the box office at (203) 787-4282, toll free at (800) 782-8497, or visit www.LongWharf.org.